Southern Illinois University CarbondaleOpenSIUC

A Privileged Past Creative Works

11-2010

Act 6: A Sixth Sense?James Smith AllenSouthern Illinois University Carbondale, jsallen@siu.edu

Follow this and additional works at: http://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/histcw_ppAct 6 is the book's final chapter.

This Acts 4-6 is brought to you for free and open access by the Creative Works at OpenSIUC. It has been accepted for inclusion in A Privileged Past byan authorized administrator of OpenSIUC. For more information, please contact opensiuc@lib.siu.edu.

Recommended CitationAllen, James S. "Act 6: A Sixth Sense?." (Nov 2010).

224: Act 6

Act 6: A Sixth Sense?

Nearly every day at work, I jog around Campus Lake. A leafy canopy filters the

early morning light as a cool mist rises amidst the bright flecks of sun on the water. Dry

leaves, algae’d inlets, and loblolly pines scent the autumn air. Because the Mississippi

is not far away, the Canadian geese honk on the flyway headed south; the waggling mal-

lards along the shore will soon join them. I still taste the breakfast coffee now salted with

sweat from my upper lip. Eyes stinging, heart rushing, lungs heaving, I finish in a sprint

on soft, wet grass glowing from the lingering summer in the soil.

The fall is a generous season in southern Illinois. It reminds me of the places I

have run over the years, though not always in such fine weather. The same sensations

occur in vastly different locales. In Boston winters, it is hard not to slip on the icy side-

walks. In early spring, the Oklahoma wheat greens up before the wind billows it into

waves of straw. In the summer, the vineyard hillsides outside of Freiburg are not yet

ready for harvest; the earliest grapes, aluminous and hard, cluster tightly on the vine.

Most of all, however, the fall reminds me of running in exurban Silver Spring; the trees,

the air, the sun, the hills, the geese, even the infrequent snowfalls are much as they are

in Makanda township, home back home (ill. 13).

A jogger for 50 years, I have taken many routes. Some traced the sands of the

Aegean in Nea Makri and of the Pacific in La Jolla; others followed the princely paths of

Edinburgh and the highest levies of New Orleans, which resemble the broad ways along

the Main in Frankfurt. Of distant spaces, I prefer the parks of Paris: the prim and crowded

Luxembourg, the steep Buttes Chaumont, the expansive Champs de Mars, and my favor-

ite, the southside Montsouris. This inclined course near the cité universitaire is filled with

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare eat a peach?

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

– T.S. Eliot (1917)

225: Act 6

swift-footed students, the fairest of them sporting designer outfits and the scents of fash-

ionable eau de cologne, a source of inspiration on the uphill.

One notable feature of this Parisian park is a pond filled with waterfowl. Swans,

geese, ducks, herons, egrets, and many less familiar birds nest on a small island opposite

the northeast entrance. Graceful branches of lanceolate leaves from sweet chestnuts and

European beeches frame the small refuge across the water. Passing by this point, I have

often thought of the elusive duck blind that Grandfather Allen built on the Aspatuck est-

uary by Westhampton. No one took me to see it when I was young. As Gerard Manley

Hopkins put it, “My heart in hiding stirred for a bird, the achieve of, the mastery of the

thing.” That is probably just as well; I might have been disappointed and then found less

mystery to the Parc Montsouris and its bucolic avatars.

The links between short- and long-term memories suggest still more connections,

like those between sensory experience and less accessible manners of knowing. The phy-

sicality of running, its compression of time and space offer another approach to oneself

and one’s surroundings. As all five senses are engaged, indeed heightened by exercise,

a sixth reveals alternatives to mere empirical reality. The body’s own rhyme and reason,

under the right circumstances, propose a present informed by intuition, perception, and,

dare I say, faith. One senses possibilities, beyond the here and now, in communities of

being in the natural world. They, too, add meaning to memory.

It is no accident that these reflections arise in higher education. The very word

“university” signifies a realm of learning, to be sure, but also of learners who come to-

gether in quest of something better for themselves. They do so in an appropriate milieu,

what John Henry Newman meant by the Latin “studium generale,” which owes much

226: Act 6

to the collective endeavors of individuals – families, neighbors, professionals – in another

community redefined here by nature itself. The pond and the pastimes it invites, besides

the fleeting pleasures of a morning run, represent a larger moment for the school, one ap-

positely situated to expand its initial, more provincial mission.

Like the Atlantic and its populous beaches – or like Walden Pond and the inhabi-

tants of Concord – Campus Lake and the university exist apart and yet in sustaining re-

lationships. Students and faculty are virtual, migratory creatures, regularly bringing vari-

ety to this ecological niche; and when they abscond, they carry with them their encoun-

ters in a microcosm variously networked, as it is, to a wider universe. Waves of innova-

tion, akin to seasonal rains, saturate and revive this spot with resources from still further

away. “No man is an island entire to itself”; no pond rests apart; no institution grows by

itself. This boundless site and its timeless cycles posit some noteworthy stories on the

run, if you will, through the hippocampus to deep memory and even deeper emotion.

6

Southern Illinois is an unlikely place for a university. The Ozarks stretch across

the poorest part of the state, pocked by the ponds left by former surface mining for coal,

far from the economic pull of Chicago. Local prosperity, what little existed, owed most to

the traffic in people and goods up and down the Mississippi and east-west along the Ohio.

South of the prairie, this land between the rivers is rolling and wooded, the home of the

Shawnee National Forest named after a tribe from the eastern Ohio valley in the centuries

after the Cahokia civilization. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark noted the region’s

isolation in 1803. The cultural norms remain of the upland, antebellum South where es-

caped slaves, such as Huckleberry’s Jim, were not safe until they had moved further north

227: Act 6

to Springfield and beyond. In 1858 the audience backed Stephen Douglas in his debate

with Abraham Lincoln in Jonesboro just north of Cairo, still pronounced like a brand of

corn syrup, where Charles Dickens lost his shirt in real estate speculation.

Southern Illinois Normal College was founded in Carbondale, an Illinois Central

railway depot, right after the Civil War (1869). It enrolled two African Americans in its

inaugural class of 37. As with teacher training elsewhere in the state, it arose in the sha-

dow of the better-known, land-grant school, the University of Illinois (U of I). The tidal

wave of veterans on the GI Bill after World War II transformed the normal college into a

regional university, though it never ceased preparing instructors for the area.

One by one, Southern Illinois University Carbondale (SIUC) added academic pro-

grams, including graduate degrees and campuses in Springfield and Edwardsville near St.

Louis. The legislature showered its largesse on these projects to stimulate the local econ-

omy, especially when President Delyte Morris (1948-1970) planned an educational insti-

tution second only to the flagship in Urbana-Champaign. By the time Morris retired, suf-

fering as he did the first signs of Alzheimer’s disease, SIUC had tripled its enrollments,

from less than seven thousand to more than twenty thousand.

The 1960s were an exciting time in Carbondale. As the university grew, erecting

new buildings and hiring new faculty, it developed its own unbridled character. Much of

campus was constructed in less than a decade; and with the raw concrete of Faner Hall,

it looked it. Morris personally lured creative luminaries, such as Buckminster Fuller and

Marjorie Lawrence, for prolonged stints in residence. At one point the library, named af-

ter Morris, had an acquisitions budget in the humanities larger than the U of I’s. Students

were politically involved when national issues, like the war in Vietnam, intersected with

Comment [1]: Charles Dickens In his American Notes (1842), Charles Dickens expressed a jaundiced view of all Americans, not just from southern Illinois. Besides loathing slavery and its abhorrent brutalities, he was stung by egregious in-fringements of his authorial property-rights. His books were sold everywhere in the US, but he received not a penny from their purchase. So by the time he reached Cairo, where he had gambled away a goodly sum in risky land deals, Dickens was not well disposed to what he saw there: “a hot-bed of disease, an ugly sepulchre, a grave uncheered by any gleam of promise; a place without one single quality, in earth or air or water, to commend it.” He clearly knew little of life between the rivers.

228: Act 6

local ones, like parietal hours in the dormitories. Blacks lived onsite, an oasis of interra-

cial accommodation, long before Civil Rights legislation mandated it.

“Even today,” mused John Gardner wistfully in 1973, “nobody arrives at and no-

body escapes from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale by accident.” This oft-

quoted phrase was a rare accolade from the noted novelist, who earned a raise despite his

errant confabulations. The speedy growth and unrestrained optimism, which pervaded

Morris’s enlightened despotism, came to an abrupt halt when his successor, David Derge,

oversaw the summary dismissal of 104 staff members, not quite sure what money would

be saved in doing so. Notwithstanding Derge’s arrogant incapacity – he was president for

two years but plodded on, an overpaid professor, for another twenty – Morris’s legacy

remained because the university could not give it up. With dwindling state support over

the years, it almost succeeded.

“The calculated recklessness of it” endured at a school “unburdened by tradition

or any debilitating sense of its own importance,” in a “country so beautiful you wonder

that people would leave it outdoors,” as Gardner likened Mark Twain’s literary conceit.

So it would be until better things happened. SIUC is an institution with a future far less

promising than its past, however much better a place it is to work now than it was when

Morris stepped down soon after a scandal erupted over the building still named after W.

Clement Stone, a confidant and benefactor of untimely generosity. The faculty actually

does more than teach and chair committees to merit tenure and promotion; the ambitious

provost Frank Horton fixed that in 1978 when the school finally proved itself worthy of

the delta’s delectable peaches and river-bending earthquakes.

6

229: Act 6

Since then SIUC has consolidated. It serves today fewer than eighteen thousand

on-campus students enrolled in a broader inventory of respectable, some nationally rank-

ed degree programs. The freewheeling curriculum has been subjected to peer review and

accreditation. Moreover, the faculty has turned its interests to research to sustain a grow-

ing graduate school. It is remarkable to note the increased productivity of the universi-

ty’s many scholars, who are no longer a small, transient elite but an enduring presence.

Awards have recognized the likes of Charles Fanning in Irish Studies, Larry Hickman on

John Dewey, and Rodney Jones in poetry. So the Morris heritage lives on in ways more

visible to professionals than to the public – or to the pupils who seem to persist ever so

placidly in another kingdom of their own.

In 1991 when Anne and I arrived in Carbondale – population 25,597 during inter-

sessions – we were drawn by the cachet of our new colleagues. Helmut Liedloff, the au-

thor of the most widely used German textbooks in the country, was still on staff. Harvey

Gardiner had just retired from decades of distinguished scholarship on Latin America. I

was hired to replace Henry Vyverberg and Stan Zucker, the former in intellectual history,

the latter in social history, both of modern Europe. I would not do as well as they, but I

felt honored to succeed them and to complement Arnold Barton on France since 1789.

After more than a decade of retrenchment, the Department of History was authorized to

recruit talented, younger hands, such as Chen Jian who later accepted endowed chairs at

the University of Virginia and Cornell; his career debuted at SIUC.

The historical profession did not originate or conclude in Carbondale. From here,

I have been in fruitful conversation with mentors across the country. I have already men-

tioned Bob Nye at the University of Oklahoma, now emeritus from an endowed chair at

230: Act 6

Oregon State. His scholarly passions defined new fields of inquiry. But I must also men-

tion other American scholars of modern France and beyond: Karen Offen at Stanford,

Robert Darnton at Harvard, Steven Hause at Washington in St. Louis, and Jim Johnson

at Boston (whose summer meal at the Place des Vosges my wife and I still recall fondly).

Because of our mutual concerns, these historians provided far more stimulation than my

officemates in Carbondale (except when we brawled); frequent professional meetings,

international travel, and the new communications technology saw to that.

In this context I have come to learn that individuals make a university’s reputa-

tion, not the other way around. Such a lesson is fraught for fresh-faced faculty and stu-

dents; they often identify with the school because of what others have made of it. In their

maturation, they realize that for an institution to thrive everyone must contribute. Its priv-

ilege is not an entitlement; it is earned one book, one grant, one prize, one graduate at a

time. Here lies the locus of our cultural capital in which we all share. Europeans have un-

derstood this purpose for founding the first universities in the tenth century. A millenni-

um later and an ocean away from the Parisian Latin Quarter, it is just as true here in the

American Midwest.

The best revenge may be living well, but any scholar intent upon the “high life”

will not find it in the professoriate, notwithstanding the cynical counsels of Marcel Pagn-

ol’s jaded erstwhile professor, Monsieur Topaze: “le mépris des proverbes c’est le com-

mencement de la fortune.” Deliberative communities of collective effort, such as our

most precious resources in higher education, are ill-suited to consumer society’s appeals

to lucre, luxury, and leisure. As Goethe’s Faust might have termed misplaced material

obsessions, the insidious “Ramada Inn” syndrome now replicates the “Ozzie and Harriet”

231: Act 6

effect of our parents’ day. There is much to be said instead for the quality of life, the in-

tellectual’s prerogatives, as they are understood overseas. In his bizarre and byzantine af-

fectations, Jean-Paul Sartre, for one, praised the pursuit far more than he pawed its prey.

6

“And gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche,” wrote Geoffrey Chaucer of the un-

worldly clerk. The joys of discovery are declared with delight and not solely in academe.

But we owe to the presence of our students in the university the tuition they pay for our

work on their behalf. Our relationship with them is inherently reciprocal. Because of their

needs as well as their bounty, we are obliged to imbue them with our learning. Scholar-

ship without a broader audience is not scholarship at all; it is self-indulgence. A Kantian

pedagogical imperative informs what we do, what others like me do. The very best of us

are teacher-scholars who profess in the classroom with the same zeal and attention they

devote to their publications. It is more than a moral duty, of course; it is a happy one.

I have found many unexpectedly satisfying – and not so satisfying – moments on

the job. Students make them happen; the semester changes in the presence of each new

cadre. In more than thirty years in the academy, the very best course I have ever taught –

“Western Civilization since 1715” in fall 1995 – and the very worst course I have ever

taught – the identical syllabus in the following spring – owed most to the pupils who had

registered. The first term I rejoiced in thoughtful, well-informed brilliance; the second

term I despaired of thoughtless, ignorant stupidity. The first class was a pleasure to lead;

I was inspired. The second class was misery itself; I had failed. But I benefited more in

failure than in inspiration.

In the midst of my misery, Jamal Hooks, a sly-witted history-education major, in-

Comment [2]: The Philosopher Simone de Beauvoir stated of Jean-Paul Sartre, her long-time companion, “il n’est pas passionné par la sexualité. C’est un homme chaleureux, vivant, en tout sauf au lit.” For him, preliminaries were everything. This cur-ious, cursory observation appears in a letter to Nelson Algren, for some years Beauvoir’s closest connection to the American Midwest (Algren lived in Chicago, but figures as Lewis Brogan in his paramour’s roman à clef, Les Mandarins, otherwise set in Paris). The pas-sage intimates that Existentialist philosophy, whatever its ethical shortcomings, really does live up to its most famous slogan: “l’existence précède l’essence.” I thank fellow Francophile Frank Gunderson for the reference to Beau-voir’s missive and for the opportunity to dis-cuss her affinities for the US. I am not sure from which philosopher I have learned the most – Beauvoir, Sartre, or Gunderson.

232: Act 6

terrupted a discussion of Voltaire’s famous line in Candide, “Il faut cultiver notre jar-

din.” “Professor Allen, sir, don’t you think that racism is more central to Western civi-

lization?” I had no ready answer. His query, worthy of Mahatma Gandhi, may have been

tangential to my professional training and research expertise, but it was hardly tangential

to Jamal’s needs and experience. He adhered to the tenets of Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of

Islam on the south side of Chicago; he felt impelled to challenge the institutions I repre-

sented. Although he would eventually become a music impresario with a presence on the

web, he forced me, rightly so, to re-think my courses in modern European history.

I now understand that I have people to reach not just erudition to flaunt. My pu-

pils at a public university very nearly resemble the population elsewhere in the state, with

a few notable differences (the enrollment is disproportionately young, male, non-His-

panic, and from lower-middle income families). I need to consider who they are, not just

what I know. As higher education democratizes with state and federal support – or so we

hope – it means the presence of more students, like my questioner, whose instruction, if

it is to be effective, must touch their lives. And so I find myself talking more about the

gendered, ethnic, and racial implications of the Enlightenment, for instance. As a con-

sequence, I am a better teacher and my charges are better learners.

Clearly it is not the deftest students I remember, probably for comparable reasons

I am not the most adept instructor my students recall. Occasionally I receive affecting

notes from aging alumni who tell me, years later, how I transfigured their lives, despite

my dim memory of them. More often, I speak bemusedly of the outrageous figures who

graced my classrooms, whose mental states, I am sure, required professional palliative

care. Substance abuse and addiction, schizophrenia, bipolar and obsessive-compulsive

233: Act 6

personality disorders – some of which I recognized, most of which I did not – all appear-

ed over the years. However tragic, though hardly anomalous, they have been the source

of consternation – and revelation.

One individual in particular – I will call him Don because he is still around – took

two of my courses. Each time he did, I regretted it. His Asperger’s syndrome, a form of

autism with all its complex physical tics and unpredictable interjections, was extremely

disruptive because he sat upfront in view of everyone in the room. There was no way I

could control his antics without ejecting him from our midst. Upon reflection, for the

sake of the other students enrolled in the courses, I should have. He did not need high-

er education so much as better medication.

One day, Don arrived more agitated than usual. He could barely restrain his

coughing behind the white surgeon’s mask over his face. Halfway through the hour, the

victim of a vicious hacking fit, he rummaged through his knapsack, loudly rustling rump-

led papers and thumping dog-eared books, to clutch a huge flask of cough syrup, which

he proceeded to chug, the facemask pushed atop his tilted head. The class gawked in awe

as he slaked his thirst for this viscous liquor. Having downed the entire bottle to subdue

his gasping at last, he repacked his backpack pensively, then burped beatifically before

repositioning his elastic mask with a snap. Daft Don’s febrile performance far surpassed

my own for the long minutes that he held center stage.

6

Over the years, mostly by observing masters at their craft, such as Barbara Wal-

voord at Notre Dame and Doug Eder at Arizona State, I have learned a few things. A-

bove all, I know, scholarship and instruction are necessary complements. The capable

234: Act 6

researcher is an inspiring teacher, indeed the best, when the fervor for inquiry and crea-

tion is brought into the classroom. Effective teaching is not an innate ability inherited by

a felicitous few, a tiny coterie; it is a consciously cultivated skill acquired by a consorti-

um of consummate professionals. It strikes a sensible balance between conveying a body

of knowledge and developing a manner of knowing, since command of a discipline re-

sults in both. All this, the product of experience and reflection, the conscientious mentor

of undergraduate and graduate students understands.

At the heart of this sound notion, I think, lies an interpersonal etiquette; it is lit-

tle more than (un)common courtesy. Professors must resist their instinctive inclination,

which is to discourse at length on everything they know (or pretend to know) whether or

not anyone is listening or much less cares. Oh, we can be such Casaubons, unconscion-

able pedants to torment the likes of an impressionable Dorothea Brooke or an incredulous

Dr. Wagner. The result is mere rote not true learning. As a rule lectures have the least im-

pact; just hours later, even with adequate notes, few folks can recall what they heard. The

professor’s oral activity does not get past the students’ aural passivity. Far better learning

occurs when minds appropriate mastery of the material and its applications, apart from

the faculty foghorns and the inculcation of “inert ideas” that Alfred North Whitehead la-

mented 80 or so years ago.

Fortunately, a better kind of instruction is pervasive. It is actually the norm in

small rooms, laboratories, studios, seminars, and other locales distanced from imperson-

al auditoria. Because of certain lackadaisical habits and a few huge classes – the most

problematic sites at the university – we deem fit to pontificate on everything when, in

fact, we should not. The vital interchange between pedagogue and pupil occurs in more

235: Act 6

humane settings: office hours, coffee shops, playing fields, Internet blogs, and other spa-

ces where everyone can become an active learner. An academic program consisting of

these interactions makes possible the best teaching and learning. It is the magic of the

university and its privileged opportunities for students as well as researchers, both pled-

ged to a mutual quest to know and do well.

Since my days at Brown, I have tried variations on traditional curriculum and in-

struction. At Tufts I participated in a living-learning community focused on the complex

significance of organic metaphors. If nothing else, the course was aptly named, “Roots

and Growth.” At Phillips I helped refashion its general studies based on great artifacts in

the Western tradition. Sad to say, it did not avert the school’s bankruptcy. At SIUC, with

the support of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, I resorted to problem-based

learning, an approach refined at the SIU School of Medicine. For two years, sixty under-

graduates studied how not to learn, and not much else (one of them asked after I had

quoted from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, “Is that a real poem, or did you make it

up?”). They were grateful for the experience, I suppose, but its flaws do give one pause.

As a teacher now, I am less maladroit; I have learned from my mistakes. I no

longer hold the floor more than ten minutes at a time and engage instead in Socratic di-

alogues about the assigned reading, on which my classes have written brief statements

in answer to the principal question for the hour. At times, when the space allows, I divide

students into groups to work collectively on closely related concerns. Their deliberations

are then reported to the entire class for further dialogic discussion. Frequent quizzes, im-

promptu writing, and informal presentations promote more active probing of key issues

in the course. The new instructional technology makes easier the use of audio-visual

Comment [3]: Problem-Based Learning Problem-based learning (PBL) has develop- ed into a widely-used pedagogy, thanks to the earnest efforts of colleagues at the Uni-versity of Delaware and Samford University, national clearinghouses for PBL activities. PBL originated in the training of physicians at Canada’s McMaster University. In 1973 Howard Barrows brought the most radical version of the practice, as curriculum, to the SIU School of Medicine, which became a model for other medical schools. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation thought worth-while our iteration of PBL in SIUC’s Univer-sity Core Curriculum and bankrolled the pro-ject briefly while all other programs were in budgetary retrenchment. Unfortunately, the experiment was not retained, but the School of Medicine continues to use a variation of PBL.

236: Act 6

materials, which for some of us are also essential to the grasp of critical concepts. This

comprehension matters most, when, as learning strategies, passivity and anonymity gain

no traction.

I have been most inspired by my colleagues’ explicit appeals to dignity and self-

respect. Thom Mitchell’s market days in introductory economics, Pamela Smoot’s col-

laborative learning in black history, and Meera Komarraju’s careful integration of differ-

fent media in psychology empower inexperienced pupils to seize responsibility for their

own learning. My peers show them how in the context of disciplinary knowledge and

thought, not in lieu of it. Their attention to students and their aspirations ensures that ul-

timately this regard is richly rewarded. What Henry James once advised novice writers,

the best academics tell their charges, in so many words: “Try to be one of the people on

whom nothing is lost!” Such solicitude, I find, works wonders in the wide swath of hu-

man potential.

6

Originally, a thousand years ago, guilds protected the interests of instructors. In

the Middle Ages, students often failed to fund their tuition, unqualified teachers compe-

ted for paying pupils, and city and church officials regulated scholastic business for their

own aims. These problems and others analogous to them, in one form or another, remain.

As legally recognized institutions with certain prerogatives like the granting of degrees,

universities must protect the integrity of their operation. This imperative demands of the

faculty considerable time to keep their house in order. If they fail to do so, someone else

will do it for them – and not always very wisely. The resulting risk is sheer mayhem.

Such is the rationale for committees, such is the governance of institutions shared

237: Act 6

between highly specialized but impractical faculty and a more practical but unspecialized

administration. It does not require a chemist to preside at meetings, though chemists have

tried and not done overly well, at substantial personal and organizational cost. A scholar

takes years to train; an educational functionary, however, has neither sinecure nor disci-

pline. Given experience and common sense, a leader chosen from one or the other type

matters little, but all of us must accept some remit in the choice – now including mine.

The Roome family example of public service, reflected in my parents’ own glim-

mers of civic-mindedness, foretold my efforts on behalf of others. In high school, col-

lege, the military, and beyond, I have undertaken blissfully unremunerative work (scho-

larship is the most obvious) that improved if not elevated the lives of others. At least that

was my intent because there was little other reward for these chores. And chores they

were, washing dishes at church suppers, canvassing door to door against the war in Viet-

nam, typing emergency leave papers for a grieving sailor, helping fellow researchers at

libraries and archives overseas, writing grants to keep a struggling school afloat, finding

jobs for former students – the litany is long and familiar. As self-serving as it is to men-

tion them, these gestures constitute elements of cultural capital – vestigial and habitual

elements perhaps, but still substantive, formative, and necessary to the public welfare.

In academe, more sustained service is sine qua non to the profession. Some-

one must chair committees in the department to make new appointments, for example.

Someone must advise administrators in their decisions to promote and tenure colleagues;

someone must consider ways to save money during a budget crisis; someone must speak

up about dysfunctional management. As a member of the faculty, I have done all these

things and more. Everyday I encounter people whose teaching I observed, whose job I

238: Act 6

saw reassigned, or whose positions I criticized. The university is a small town in need

of everyone’s contributions.

A term as president of Faculty Senate (1998-1999) taught me the virtues and vi-

ces of participatory governance. It was a stormy year of obstinate conflict between SIU

president Ted Sanders and SIUC chancellor Jo Ann Argersinger. I watched aghast as

these ambitious figures scuffled for the mantle of Delyte Morris’s legacy. Sanders sought

to align the logistics of the school’s three campuses, while Argersinger aimed to estab-

lish the autonomy of the university in Carbondale. Despite their defects, these adminis-

trative styles, one bureaucratic, the other charismatic, were textbook illustrations of Max

Weber’s descriptions of alternative institutional leadership. In the end, the chancellor

was sacked, the president found another job, and the community was left sharply divid-

ed. This pitiful past robbed us of a better future.

In the interim I learned that a serviceable present also comes at a cost. My break-

fast meetings with Sanders, for instance, were excruciating. At times I felt we spoke dif-

ferent languages, he embraced so few of my assumptions concerning higher education.

When I told Sanders how tenured colleagues at Phillips had committed to working a full

semester without pay, if need be, to keep the school open, he was startled. Such a daring

gesture, like the dedication of humanists to their texts, was beyond his ken. In response,

he enumerated the job offers he declined in order to remain at SIU. I was caught equal-

ly breathless by Sanders’s boss, A.D. Van Meter, the chairman of the university’s Board

of Trustees, a banker by trade, who dilated on the responsibilities of governance as if I

had no idea; acting on behalf of my peers, I must have threatened his authority. Neither

man asked what I did; both thought they knew who I was: “Honni soit qui mal y pense.”

Nota Bene: The university is a small town in need of everyone’s contributions.

(page 238)

239: Act 6

I was lucky to have been in Berlin when the Faculty Senate, under my successor’s

guidance, voted no-confidence in President Sanders for firing Chancellor Argersinger

(June 1999). I had given my proxy to Kay Carr, then president of the Faculty Association,

to deliberate freely with our peers in the Senate about the issue. The collaboration was

typical between these two constituencies. That priceless cooperative spirit dissipated as

the school’s crisis of direction deepened. Internal dissension made matters worse. The in-

terim chancellor, John Jackson (1999-2001), had been appointed by Sanders and so lack-

ed the legitimacy of a regular appointment, which the constituents normally sanction or

share in making. However able, Jackson muddled along with the equivocal support of his

colleagues, but he did draw a masterful map of land-use for future stewards to construe.

The campus managed begrudging accommodation with Chancellor Walter Wend-

ler (2001-2006), who was less interested in cooperating with others than he was in getting

things done. He convened 200 people – magnanimous donors, local business poohbahs,

plus faculty, staff, and students – to envisage a strategic plan, which he called Southern

at 150 (2004), to put SIUC among the nation’s top 75 research institutions by the univer-

sity’s 150th anniversary in 2019. But the document was suspiciously similar to the one

for Texas A & M which Wendler had drafted earlier. Inflecting broadly different paths

to narrowly different ends, such as the design configurations of Saluki Way, the new SIU

President, Glenn Poshard (2006-), wasted little time in dismissing the Texas architect.

We are now on the ninth chancellor, Rita Cheng, in my 19 years at Carbondale.

Shared governance has improved modestly. The collective bargaining agreement in 2006

was reached in record time and without acrimony. The Senate and its counterpart, the

Graduate Council, which oversees advanced degree programs, play a singular role in the

240: Act 6

selection of new hands at the helm. Four percent more faculty members work for the uni-

versity than did a decade ago. And there seems to be a forthrightness about the school’s

biggest current problem: given the Illinois government’s near bankruptcy, we must bol-

ster a budget based on better enrollments. The question remains: just how effective will

be yet another administration hobbled by its self-inflicted wounds?

How About Some Tea?

Since 1999 I have teamed up with others to improve the University Core Curric-

ulum (UCC) required of all SIUC’s undergraduates. It is what we ask our students to

experience irrespective of their majors: the foundation skills of math, speech, and com-

position; the disciplinary breadth of the natural and life sciences, social sciences, human-

ities, fine arts, and human health; and the integrated study of multiculturalism and inter-

disciplinarity. Other universities call this curricular collection “general studies,” “general

education,” or “distribution requirements.” But the UCC is actually a structured sequence

of courses conceived and delivered by the faculty in their respective disciplines. So it has

its own troupe of capable, zealous, and vocal advocates.

The gap between the ideal and the real yawns wide, revealing a space that every

institution must necessarily face. It is an enormous operation: every semester nearly ten

thousand people are registered in one or more course from an instructional staff of 750.

The classes themselves are offered by more than 35 different departments, which also

oversee coursework for graduate students and undergraduate majors as well as seed

scholarly research. The Core is just one of a department’s many duties. Consequently,

much of its delivery is assigned to young, inexperienced term-lecturers and graduate

assistants. For a third of them, the UCC is their first academic job. For another third

241: Act 6

of them, it is their last.

Here lies the biggest challenge for the Core: sustaining the university’s engage-

ment with its most vulnerable learners in a curriculum that is no one’s first priority. Other

institutions, especially smaller, private ones like Phillips, focus their mission on the first-

year experience because that is their primary purpose: to reach undergraduates. A larger,

state entity like SIUC must balance this activity with its other obligations: to promote the

research and creativity of its faculty, to train its professional and graduate students, and

to be of use to the region in which it is located. As a result, limited means are spread a-

cross many commitments critical to the school’s complex apparatus. To fulfill its charge,

the UCC must thus compete with various other mandates.

It is no easy task. Busy administrative leaders, such as my boss, the provost, al-

ocate nothing specifically for the Core. There is no one official with sole purview for its

staffing. A mere instructor, the director, must remind the chief academic officer of the

school’s debt to the myriad of people it serves. For the two colleges delivering, together,

three-fourths of the program, Liberal Arts and Science, the deans are cooperative. They

have an obvious stake in the UCC. The other college deans, however, are less exercised

and their oversight is accordingly less attentive – until they perceive an opportunity to

expand their budget by offering more courses at the entry level. Would you believe tax

accounting, computer programming, or engineering economics?

The entire system manages its mindless mediocrity, thank heavens, with the mon-

ey students bring with them. Because of the Illinois’s recent “Truth in Tuition” legisla-

tion, which guarantees each entering cohort the same annual fees for five years, the

youngest and newest “clientele” end up paying the most (the only chance universities

Comment [4]: Water, Water… Every-where To be fair, the vast majority of my SIUC col-leagues thoroughly enjoy teaching undergradu-ates. So it was no challenge whatsoever for me to recruit some of them to design an interdisci-plinary course, the work on which was funded by a training grant from the US Department of Agriculture in 2003 (we shared the award with Mississippi State University). The money went to a team of scholars in six different programs – from agricultural education to political sci-ence – for them to ponder, in class and online, the implications of water in their respective fields of inquiry. For fifteen weeks in Fall 2004, I witnessed first-hand the intense en-gagement of students and instructors at their very best in the classroom. Like water itself, teaching and learning at every level can ele-vate. It was an inspiration to watch. And to think that it was all just to satisfy a require-ment in the University Core Curriculum….

242: Act 6

now have to pass on costs is with each new wave of freshmen). If we fail to retain them,

we lose a large portion of their revenue, which is increasingly tuition driven. Ergo, the

better we teach our first- and second-year classes, the more likely they will continue

their studies and provide the resources we need to educate them. After decades of rela-

tive disregard, the most at-risk among us are at last the cynosure of our concern. Or as

John Dewey wrote in another context, “all that society has accomplished for itself is put,

through the agency of the school, at the disposal of its future members.”

Although this logic may seem painfully obvious outside the academy, it is not at

all obvious inside it. Universities, the public ones in particular, are sheltered from the va-

garies of the marketplace because citizens require reliable, essential services. Higher ed-

ucation fosters a more productive workforce from which everyone benefits, not just the

graduates themselves. But because taxpayers no longer subsidize their institutions as they

used to – the legislature appropriates barely 25 percent of SIUC’s operating budget each

fiscal year – we must find other funding to function; so tuition-paying students are more

important than ever. For their trade, state schools compete directly with each other as

well as with their private counterparts. In an increasingly competitive enterprise, the Core

is one way we can distinguish ourselves with inventive dispatch.

The prerequisite is a well-marketed matter of quality. As director I can do little

about marketing, but I strive hard for quality, or at least its perception. Every semester

I ask instructors participating in the UCC to report on their courses. They share copies

of their syllabi, handouts, assignments, and examinations; and they document students’

achievement of the learning objectives and the changes to the course this achievement

implies. As you can imagine, such oversight is intrusive and not always welcomed by

243: Act 6

busy staff. But the vast majority of my colleagues enter into this exercise with justifiable

pride. My visits with them to review the courses they teach, including classroom obser-

vations by invitation, are welcomed because an informed peer cares about what they do.

I have nothing to offer them but my sincere interest in their pedagogical practices. Their

reward is not material or venal – at times I wish it were – but professional, moral, and

salutary.

Can we do better? In fact, yes. We can train our instructors, especially the least

experienced of them, more effectively than we do. We can integrate our curriculum so

related courses are taught more collaboratively. We can create more living-learning com-

munities to help students talk with each other about the courses they are taking together.

We can afford much better support – academic advisement, supplemental instruction, and

tutoring services – for everyone who needs it. After several years of benign neglect of

entry-level classes, the Core needs more quality control. It must check faculty indif-

ference and serve as a corrective in our work with undergraduates who struggle to make

the difficult transition from high school to the university. My most sanguine moments at

SIUC have been in making this seminal liminality more bearable.

6

Another project I have undertaken with trepidation is SIUC’s University Honors

Program (UHP). Like the University Core Curriculum, the UHP is in everyone’s interest

– the best students enliven the entire institution – but it is no one’s job, except perhaps

the director’s, to deal with such curious circumstances. When I arrived, the Honors office

was on the third floor of Faner Hall, hidden so only folks seeking faculty in Sociology,

Linguistics, or History could find it, mostly by accident. The assistant director in charge

244: Act 6

of major scholarship advisement claimed another Faner office that flooded every time it

rained. Twenty years of archives – student publications among them – filled one of the

five rooms intended for three academic professionals, a civil service employee, and two

part-time workers; the busiest of hives was provided the tiniest of spaces.

With annual financing of just $64,000, enhanced by the pro bono instruction by

two or three additional faculty members, the UHP offered seven courses a term, which

allowed a privileged few to fulfill Core requirements. Affiliation with Honors was strictly

voluntary. All students had to do to join was to maintain a 3.25 grade point average – just

under half of all undergraduates qualified – and to fill out a one-page application – it took

less than a minute. The coursework proffered by inspiring teachers was discretionary, as

was attendance to sponsored lectures and the breakfasts with guest luminaries such as

Jonathan Miller, David Levy, and John Updike. Of the seven thousand eligible under-

graduates, only a thousand bothered to sign up; fewer than 250 of them enrolled in a UHP

course, and just ten graduated each year with a UHP degree. The students were as hard to

find as the office.

The shepherd for 19 years, Rick Williams, waxed weary of running a makeshift

operation and retired in 2006. Because the provost preferred to dither and I was willing

to work gratis, I became Rick’s interim replacement. But I did not come cheap. In two

years, the program secured ample new quarters in the remodeled Morris Library – 2,500

square feet for a designated classroom, offices, and, to be sure, storage of the twenty

years of archives, though most of them were shipped elsewhere on campus. Provisions

were made for a full-time director as well as an associate and an assistant. The Honors

curriculum expanded to include many majors as well as the Core. There were added ben-

245: Act 6

efits to compensate for mandatory participation – a minimum of one UHP course per

semester – such as first choice in housing assignments in the residence halls, early reg-

istration, and special recognition on the transcript and the diploma at graduation. I es-

timate that my time on behalf of SIUC’s brightest kids cost an extra $100,000 a year.

Given the return on the investment, is that so bad?

In retrospect, I realize now, my attention to the Core and Honors was an ironic

turn from my undergraduate aspirations. It is hard to believe that the only requirements

for the AB degree at Brown were a mere 32 courses, eight of them in a major. There were

no hours to count, no foundation skills, disciplinary knowledge, or integrative studies to

master, no first-year experience to live, and no honors courses to take. As an undergrad-

uate, I needed rules, conventions if you will, but I established them myself, as personal

goals; I did not suffer them as institutional strictures. In fact, had I attended SIUC then,

I would have thrived in the experimental problem-based learning in the UCC and in the

voluntary version of the UHP, both of them victims of my second thoughts as to their va-

lue to very different audience in a very different context. Our students learn in a much

more tightly structured educational environment, one I would have shunned if not scorn-

ed years ago.

Universities must be held more accountable as a public good. Even though less

than a third of SIUC’s annual budget comes from legislative appropriations, it operates

on behalf of the state, albeit in its southernmost region. More than 80 percent of its stu-

dents are Illinoisans, and most of them will continue to live and pay taxes as Illinoisans.

Our mission thus has ramifications that extend far beyond a private school’s more circu-

cumscribed obligations. Accordingly, SIUC functions under additional scrutiny, as well it

246: Act 6

should. We must prove to the Illinois Board of Higher Education (IBHE) and the Higher

Learning Commission (HLC) of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools,

our principal accrediting agency, that we are fit to award degrees. Our many stakeholders

– legislators, taxpayers, parents, students, alumni, employers, donors, vendors, faculty,

and staff – all expect more than a prestigious profile; they require results.

John Gardner was right: the university’s quest for gravitās undermines its crea-

tivity and innovation. But that is a small tribute to pay, I think, for its integrity and res-

ponsibility. The documentation of what is taught and what is actually learned has been

my charge for the past several years, first for the University Core Curriculum, then for all

academic outcomes. At least my ad hoc role as acting director of University Assessment

(2005-) has reminded my colleagues of the need to demonstrate how well their programs

are working. “Assessment,” a technical term better known as “standards” in primary and

secondary schools, is the collaboration of instructors to measure, in some fashion, the im-

pact of their teaching. By the time students finish their degrees, they must know and be

able to do more than when they began. As Ernest Boyer noted back in 1987, “Measuring

the outcome of a college education, in the end, is an assessment of the institution.” This

summary judgment is even more relevant today.

Every eight years, the faculty study their degree programs and report the upshot

to the IBHE and their own accrediting agencies. Every ten years, the university examines

everything it does and presents its findings to the HLC. Even athletics must comply with

with the NCAA. In so doing, we remain transparent and thereby retain the public’s trust

in our mission to serve the state. Or, to put the matter more emphatically, we can always

be improving our scholarship, our pedagogy, and our service to a larger constituency.

Comment [5]: “Southern at 140” One of my prouder accomplishments has been coordinating the university’s successful re-accreditation effort in 2008-10. The process began with a massive self-study of all seven colleges, including the schools of medicine and law, which offer 101 undergraduate, 74 masters, and 32 professional and doctoral degrees to some 20,000 students. Following the five criteria established by the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, the 368-page document evaluates every aspect of our mission, planning, instruction, research, and service. The self-study demonstrates, I think, just how well we fulfill our commitments to stakeholders everywhere. Such is SIUC at its 140th anniversary (2009), hence the self-study’s subtitle “Southern at 140.”

247: Act 6

After years of analyzing and reporting what I find at the university, however (un)quali-

fied my judgment, I venture to say with cautious pride that we do. I would not work here

otherwise. It is one reason why, in the face of relentless obstacles, Anne and I are such

determined idealists (ill. 14).

OK, Then, Take a Nap

The rewards are extrinsic as well as intrinsic. Both Anne and I have been very for-

tunate; we have been recognized by our peers. In 1994 I was tenured and promoted to full

professor; in 2000 Anne was tenured and in 2007 promoted to the same rank, arguably

the best situation in the academy. So long as we meet our contractual obligations defined

by collective bargaining, we are in effect answerable to no one but to ourselves in what

we adore doing. We decide how best to spend our time – reading, writing, teaching, and

serving the community – during the academic calendar from August to May (with a sev-

eral-week break between semesters). The remaining months we travel overseas for ex-

tended stretches of research. Very few jobs that I am privy to – the likes of celebrated

actors, attorneys, and astronauts, perhaps – are permitted as much freedom, diversion,

or fulfillment.

With this unusual privilege, frankly, come unusual responsibilities. Now that

Anne and I are senior members of the faculty, we have assumed more of the housekeep-

ing. For some years, I have directed the Core, Honors, and Assessment; Anne has been

chair of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures (DFLL). Endless meetings,

pointless reporting, obsessive colleagues, indignant students, and aleatory alarms from

the provost or the dean demand our attention every day, even while we are away. Keep-

ing up with the e-mail alone is a constant burden wherever we are. (So we have learned:

248: Act 6

the longer we take to respond, the less we need to write; and without the auto-correct

function, we risk projecting a virtual parapraxis or other digital sublimation.)

The university is rich in cultural capital. Its biggest bounty lies in the phenomen-

al resources of its well-trained and creative faculty, and we do our best to recruit and ac-

culturate them carefully to academia because they are invariably with us for a long time.

Their specialties are sharply focused to the exclusion of all other concerns, which makes

such expertise moderately inflexible, a meager price to pay for the extraordinary wealth

of their work as scholars and artists, as teachers and mentors, as colleagues in service to

the profession. Psychologists like David Gilbert are exploring the sources of nicotine ad-

diction, engineers like Max Yen are developing practical applications of nano-technolo-

gy, and painters like Najjar Abdul-Musawwir are animating new forms in color. Their

students are learning extraordinary things from them, and their contributions to the wi-

der world are inestimable.

All is not sweetness and light. It is hard to overlook the misuse of the school’s as-

sets by perfectly innocuous administrators; they squander time and treasure on such fas-

tidious frivolities as tidying up office space, handwriting official communiqués, belittl-

ing the efforts of subordinates, redesigning logos and letterheads – I have seen it all. Fa-

culty, too, star in some Ziegfeld follies of their own: literary scholars prepping for mara-

thons, attorneys vying for local public office, and engineers dabbling in recreational liti-

gation – not always on behalf of others. At times, we deserve the pointed parodies that

David Lodge, Richard Russo, and Kingsley Amis have written of our self-anointed spe-

cial pleaders; the pompously irritating Professor Welch – the “incurable evader” foiled

by his understudy in Amis’s Lucky Jim – highlights their legendary circumlocutions.

249: Act 6

Viewed from another country, better yet from another continent, the university’s

comedy plays to a small, fickle audience. While some players act out their petty parts, the

rest of the cast remains on a much larger stage represented by Morris library. The library

embodies the best SIUC has to offer well beyond its proscenium, not just to itself but to

the world. I am astonished how forcefully it projects, wherever we are, in Paris and Frei-

burg as well as in Carbondale, via the Internet. Information technology has virtually

thrust the school far from southern Illinois. The web has granted higher education a glo-

bal presence. My contacts overseas are as convenient and as insistent as my e-mail can

make them. Not long ago it took less than an hour to assemble a panel on Freemasonry

for a conference in Paris. In the process, it mattered not one wit where I was or what else

I did.

Scholarship and creative activities are no longer of small-town, parochial, anti-

quarian interest. Their implications are immediately felt abroad, just as the results of

work further afield are felt in Carbondale. The institution’s physical location is imma-

terial. International communication and transportation have created a universal network

of professional and personal relationships, now an everyday reality, so that colleagues

and students from every continent are right at hand. The university embraces nearly all

nations, all cultures, all peoples. We may speak one form of English, but I am grateful

that we do not command all its forms. We still have languages, our own among them,

to learn from those in our very midst. As Montaigne observed of his goodly experience,

“nostre contestation est verbale,” that is to say, the distance in our personal relations is

not spatial but semantic.

6

250: Act 6

One’s coordinates remain fixed. When my wife and I are abroad, Europeans of-

ten ask from where we hail, though they generally ask where we are headed (it is more

polite and they are more likely to know something about places closer by). Our response

is the country whose passport we carry, but we prefer to tell our interlocutors that home

lies in the woods of southern Illinois. Its charm is a pleasure to recall and share with

others who love natural beauty, too. Our mail is delivered to Carbondale, but we live in

Makanda township just to the south, across the road from the national forest. Makanda

proper, population 419, has just five nondescript shops, a Masonic lodge, Town Hall, and

Baptist church on the far side of the railroad tracks, a stone’s throw from the one-horse

post office and Alan Stuck’s jewelry studio. The Giant City State Park nearby attracts

autumnal travelers to see the foliage. Further afield are assorted enclaves of houses built

by university employees and their families. Such is our pastoral Union Hill.

Anne and I live in an intense and enchanted viridity, right through the summer

months. A bright, light chartreuse in the first tiny willow leaves contrasts sharply with

deep, dark, folded fronds of the cedars. Walnuts, maples, sassafras, black oaks, and choke

cherries fill out the verdant shades between them. Out back on our three acres, with no

adjacent house in sight, several dozen different, readily identifiable species of plant life

compete for the sun and our attention, it seems, in the ever-changing play of light and

dark. For nearly half the year, the woods are tropically luxuriant in the Mississippi delta

that reaches up into the land of little Egypt, as the region here is dubbed – no one knows

why. The arboreal landscape is less like the Nile than the Amazon.

The tree trunks stand out in the stark, virile winters. Without upper-canopy or

undergrowth, the woods brandish their inner recesses of varied shades, this time of

Nota Bene: As art historian Kenneth Clark remarked, “all living things are

our brothers and sisters.” (page 254)

251: Act 6

browns. Each tree’s bark is another hue, from the off-white of the smoothest sycamores

to the stippled shades of the blackest locust. The mocha leaves blanket what little green

rests beneath the empty branches, “bare ruined choirs” in their arching from one wooded

pilaster to another. The only hints of the summer left or to come are the line of loblollies

standing downhill to the pond below, which freezes over to a soft silver for about five

weeks every year. Around the house the yellowed meadow weeds have encroached in

every flowerbed; they never disappear, it seems, however much they are pulled or spray-

ed; the vetch, foxtails, clover, wild chives, and dandelions are a life-force year round.

The forest’s lushest tones are reserved for spring and autumn. Clothed in fresh

foliage, as Mark Twain described it, the hills are “a gracious and worthy setting.” More

discreet in its display is the carpet of wildflowers, whose names vary from one county to

the next. Anne and I know them as snowbells, foxgloves, wake robins, bluebonnets, may

apples, and Queen Anne’s lace, which also blossom briefly before they fade into the low-

lying growth around them. Even in their glory they are easy to overlook, especially in

the fall when a far less subtle transformation takes its turn. Everyone’s favorite season,

despite its vulgarity, passes in less than a month. As the trees lose their multi-colored

cover, clouds of red and orange drift deça, delà, à la Verlaine in the barest breeze.

The animals are no less evident in the woods. The herds of ravenous deer are ver-

itable pests whose sudden, magical appearance near the house never ceases to mystify.

Almost every night, safe in their soundly sleeping human company, they settle down with

a thump against our bedroom wall. The squirrels hop in annoyance at the crows, which

have wandered tauntingly close to caches of walnuts buried in the grass. The flighty blue-

birds keep their distance from the assertive jays. Each May, for just a week or two, the

252: Act 6

flashy red, bandit-eyed cardinals call their mates in a series of “thirty-twos” followed

by a varying number of chirp-chirp-chirps. Pairs of feral woodchuck, opossum, skunk,

or rabbit will burrow beneath the breezeway to the garage; it provides them refuge from

predatory carnivores: foxes, hawks, and bobcats.

Whatever befalls these beasts, they all have names: the rabbits Larry and Mary,

the crows Joe and Flo, the bluebirds Hoppy and Happy, the cardinals Molly and Red-ban-

dit, and, most elegant of all, the tortoise Principessa Tortellini e Spaghetti who climbs up-

hill from the pond each spring for the wild strawberries, which grow beneath the nearest

persimmon tree. Only the deer carry no civilizing monikers; there are too many of them,

as opposed to the rapidly dwindling numbers of birds whose habitats are lost to real estate

development, pesticides, climate change, and the West Nile virus. In fifteen years, we

have seen a loss of more than half the bird life in our trees. The number of species re-

mains well short of the 101 Thomas Jefferson identified in Virginia. Alas, so much for

our stewardship of God’s creation: “and, behold, it was very good” (Genesis 1.31).

6

The local flora and fauna include our other neighbors, as likely as not, our col-

leagues at the university. They are as dear to us as the woods, but not as retiring. When

we first arrived from Oklahoma one hot muggy May with our truckload of worldly be-

longings, Sandy Johnson from next door visited with a bouquet of wildflowers and an

invitation for dinner. Anne and I were touched, but we found this benevolent gesture

impossible to reciprocate with her two hyperactive children, one of whom sang for us

loudly off-key and the other toyed at length with sharp pointed objects. Futile, paternal

admonishments thundered through the trees almost as clearly as Mark Johnson’s “Zeus

253: Act 6

mobile,” which backfired each morning at 7:45 as this prominent philosopher headed

to his office. The Johnsons’s departure for Eugene, Oregon, was thus bittersweet, just

as have been those of all our companions summoned from this tight-knit Arcardia.

We cherish the tight community of extraordinary people from all over. The Ethi-

opian mathematician, the Hungarian attorney, the Iranian engineer, the French specialist

in comparative literature, and other figures just as alien to the wilderness will offer up

their wealth of wit and wisdom during walks around the loop that serves as a local road-

way. A railroad engine driver, a county parole officer, a manager of the mental health

facility – all of them retired – have lived long enough in southern Illinois to resemble

natives, like my fine friend and language partner Frank Gunderson, a true Illinoisan

whose past parts are worth discussing in French every Friday. The men who remodeled

our house, when they were not fishing or hunting, have regaled us with their songs and

stories. In a tradition enriched by T.S. Eliot, a former feature of the region, our forest

teems with exotica.

After each trip, no matter how short, Anne and I feel relieved to be home back

home. Such relief is the expression of what we have become, midwesterners by adoption,

but also of what we now believe about the space we claim in the world, environmentalists

by default. We have made way for modulations of our own. Clearing the woods to live in

them creates a new ecosystem for plants and animals who, like ourselves, were not here

originally. We share in the delicate interplay of natural life in the forest. The crickets,

ants, and spiders, whether creeping or crawling, are at ease with us; and although we

do not always find them quite proper, we should. They are adapting to their altered sur-

roundings; they are faring even better than we: there are legions more of them.

Comment [6]: Local Color Among the more colorful characters in southern Illinois are our carpenter Tom Grant, our house painter Mike Donlea, and our housekeeper Pam Loyd. While remodel-ing the kitchen in 1991, Tom told an amusing anecdote of his “heathen” dog, which escaped the house each night to roll in the fish guts it had buried down by the pond. Mike entertain-ed us with accounts of his encounters with the crows he chased away with bottle rockets; his taste in music tended to a distinctly bawdy version of country-western. And Pam took care of our house while we were away for long periods and shared the intermittent in-discretions of her hard-scrabble life; she al-ways reminded me of my grandparents’ Irish help, Henrietta Furlong. Tom, Mike, and Pam, of course, are “natives” only because they have lived here somewhat longer than Anne and I have.

254: Act 6

As art historian Kenneth Clark once remarked, “all living things are our brothers

and sisters.” We are responsible for such creatures, not just our own flesh and blood. At

home, as infants, we learned to develop a sense of otherness, beginning with mother and

then with father and siblings. At school, as children, we differentiated ourselves from

classmates and our parents from teachers. Eventually, as young adults, we came to judge

our own family, most often unwisely, well before we sensed the compassion we owe to

others, especially the less fortunate. Eventually we turned that critical-cum-moral con-

sciousness outward as well as inward to understand ourselves more fully in community,

in the nation, in the world, on the planet. Our present duties include nature itself, the

plants and animals around us, but also the land and climate that shape our lives together.

If we fail our larger moral calling, more than Thoreau’s oracles from Walden

Pond will remind us. We will suffer the consequences, sometimes immediately, as New

Orleans experienced in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The culpability for this fiasco is

multiple. Relatives and neighbors neglected each other; the city, the parish, the state, the

country, and beyond watched in horror and then looked elsewhere to blame. The disre-

gard was universal. Nearly half of the population remains far from home; vast wetlands

are still submerged. The social and environmental catastrophes are of a piece; and we

are all implicated wherever we live, so long as we continue to use up precious natural re-

sources and pollute the water and air that affect the atmosphere we inhabit. After all, the

country’s entire heartland draws its sustenance from the Mississippi watershed.

6

After each morning’s run, as often as not, I prepare for class. My favorite course

to teach is “Art, Music, and Ideas in the Western World,” from prehistory to the present.

255: Act 6

As a colleague once put it acerbically, it is a survey “as deep as piss on a tin plate.” In

fifteen weeks I cover five thousand years of western culture, which comes to more than

a century of creative achievement in the arts and humanities every fifty minutes. The on-

ly reason I must ready for class is not to remember everything – how could I? – but to

select whatever merits my students’ attention. The easiest choices are my favorite arti-

facts arranged in chronological order, chapter by chapter, in William Fleming’s gorgeous

textbook. Cela va tout seul.

My course satisfies a fine arts requirement in the University Core Curriculum, so

most of my charges are captives of the program I administer. Very few of them will ever

study this material in more depth, and yet plenty of them will chance to ponder its impli-

cations. Western culture is ubiquitous – on TV, in film, on the web – available by iPods,

cellphones, and laptops in and around familiar architectural motifs. If nearly all literary

and philosophical texts are beyond my students’ everyday experience, certain concepts

and phrases from the canon will occur to them, whether or not they realize it. The de-

scendants of immigrants from more than 120 countries, not just from Europe and its for-

mer colonies, will recognize something of their distant homes in this subject.

Ever so briefly, the blasé sons and daughters of hard-working bricklayers, secre-

taries, and sales associates find themselves in my class. I am often peeved by their pro-

vocative indifference, but occasionally inspired by their sudden interest beyond them-

selves and their present circumstances. When they sit for their final examinations, I feel

an intensity of purpose that transcends their initial limitations and promises awareness of

better things for them. Deep in thought, however flickering it might be, they are on the

cusp of realizing how to see, hear, smell, touch, and taste another culture, of acquiring

256: Act 6

perhaps a firmer sense of possibilities now within their ken. Their awakening to halcyon

days and ways still humbles me.

Usually before I have graded the exams, still hopeful that my pupils had actually

learned something, I attend commencement. A mood of expectancy gathers during the

academic procession, the faculty in full regalia, the students seated quietly by college,

and their families ranged restlessly in the arena around us. I see it in the graduates’ faces

as they march across the stage, the proudest strutting triumphantly, arms raised, to the ca-

cophony of loved ones shouting in enthusiasm. Although I recognize very few of them –

my eighty students a term are engulfed by the four thousand who finish every year – I am

heartened by their accomplishment: they have access to the vast store of cultural capital

that a university, indeed a civilization, represents. They are demonstrably better primed

to make the most of it.

My students remind me of the 1983 film adaptation of Willy Russell’s play, Ed-

ucating Rita, about a hairdresser’s coming of age in working-class Britain. Rita took up

Immanuel Kant’s challenge, first issued by Horace and reformulated by Michel Foucault:

“sapere aude,” dare to know! By the time she had finished her degree in an “open” uni-

versity akin to SIUC, Rita had changed. She donned new clothes, assumed another name,

spoke with assurance despite her personal doubts, and, best of all, no longer needed her

old English professor. It is much the same with these young people who spare their time

with me in and out of class. Briefly they are my Rita-Susan, my Liza Doolittle, my Gala-

tea, but eventually they all elude my embrace to venture forth on their own.

Once in a while I see one of them, like some episodic sea gull astray from the fly-

way, taking a turn around Campus Lake, feeling the exhilaration I do from the region’s

257: Act 6

vernal weather. We share a voluptuously vicarious kinship. A sixth sense underlies our

rich and varied connection with far-off lands and times. As Cardinal Newman once said,

“you cannot learn to converse till you have the world to converse with.” So it seems to

me after fifty years of running various routes to this particular discovery. In its un-Ho-

meric grandeur, my modest odyssey has meant a freighted displacement from the ocean

to this clearing in the woods and its confluence of migrating life, from everywhere to here

and now, as I pause from my exertions at 37°42'26.9"N 89°13'30.8"W.

1:08:47 pm GMT Thursday, October 14, 2010

258: Act 6

Dialogue with John Gardner

JG: “You don’t seem to know who I am.”

JSA: “You’re right, Mr. Gardner, we’ve not met. But I’ve read some of your work, and

there are folks here who knew you.”

JG: “They must be old as dirt and as batty as Grendel’s besotted mother. It’s been a

while since I was in Carbondale. I didn’t keep much company there. I was too busy

writing.”

JSA: “All the same, it’s clear that southern Illinois made an impression. Many of the

landscapes your novels describe resemble the Shawnee National Forest.”

JG: “Yes, I liked biking the back roads around town. It finally killed me in New York,

you know. But there were truly breathtaking scenes near Carbondale, and I don’t mean

the university’s Thompson Woods. Despite my backhanded compliments, I did like the

place. It’s too bad my colleagues had it in for me. They must have thought I was a creepy

miscreant lurching lamely to his lair.”

JSA: “I can’t rightly say. But you were noticed.”

JG: “Well, as I once wrote, ‘even a monster’s blood-lust can be stifled by such talk.’ So

you could have been more laudatory in your bromide of a book. We really did raise holy

hell back in the Morris years. Since then, the wing-nuts at SIU – the white supremacists

and the psychotic cross-dressers – have had nothing on me.”

JSA: “People remember all too well.”

JG: “They need to just stop living in the past. As a medievalist, I know what it’s like to

relive history, but I never got stuck there the way some folks did, like David Derge. Nice

name for a keen, huh?”

259: Act 6

JSA: “And the students, Mr. Gardner? Weren’t they important to you?”

JG: “I guess so. I didn’t have any more time for them than I had for colleagues. I had

other things in mind. I’m sure my ex-wife can fill in the gory details.”

JSA: “What were you trying to accomplish at SIU?”

JG: “I saw myself teaching the infinite sadness of our lives. You don’t have to live in

Carbondale to understand. You could be anywhere in the world to realize that modernity

is no better than earlier periods in our history. If anything, it is a whole lot worse. Mod-

ernists like Gertrude Stein knew that ‘there’s no there there’ here any more. That’s what

I wanted my students everywhere to learn and to write on.”

JSA: “Did you succeed?”

JG: “Hell, no, but at least I died trying.”

JSA: “That must be the chief difference between us then, because I’d infinitely rather

live trying. That way, one has more time to finish the job, right?”

JG: “I finished it all right. A dozen books, many of them bestsellers, will do almost

anyone in.”

JSA: “Like J. Alfred Prufrock, I’ll part my hair behind and eat a peach instead, Mr.

Gardner. The sirens at the beach are waiting for me in my flannel trousers.”

JG: “You just do that – and enjoy it. When you get done, go write about how much

worse it was back in the Middle Ages, when the mechanisms of contemporary life had

yet to be invented…. It’s such fun to taunt an historian.”

JSA: “Yes, isn’t it?”